The Marauder's Love Letter
by Lor-tan
Summary: "Sirius! Quick! How do you describe how beautiful Lily's eyes are?" Started no sensible conversation ever, in the opinion of Remus Lupin.


This story was written for The Houses Competition, Year 5, Round 3

House: Gryffindor

Class: Transfiguration

Category: Drabble

Prompt: Lime

Word count: 885, not counting authors notes. Counting, it's 973.

Betas: White Eyebrow, whitetiger91

xXx

"Sirius! Quick! How do you describe how beautiful Lily's eyes are?"

Started no sensible conversation ever—in the opinion of Remus Lupin—especially when it was James Potter doing the asking, and he was holding an in-progress love letter. There was simply no hope for the following conversation; it was doomed from the start. Remus loved his friend dearly, honestly he did, he would lay down his life for him if it ever came down to it, but really, if he had to sit through much more of this...

"Um, I don't, really? Green, I guess?" came Sirius' reply.

It was actually a bit of a surprise, really. Remus had long since assumed that Sirius had some sort of an endless reserve of useless, girl-related knowledge tucked away in a corner of his mind that would have, no doubt, been better spent used to store the knowledge necessary to actually pass their Transfiguration exams so that he didn't harass Remus for help at the last possible second all the time. Apparently, though, even his womanizer-friend possessed at least the shred of decency necessary to refrain from storing such information on the girl their other friend liked.

"Kind of like a glass frog? You know, the ones where you can see their intestines from the bottom? Like that Ravenclaw girl keeps?" Peter suggested helpfully, despite literally nobody asking him, and Remus was dismayed to hear James actually pause to consider it before proclaiming that Lily's eyes were, in fact, a little bit less lime coloured.

It wasn't much to restore his faith in a recognisable future that didn't include James being violently murdered by Lily Evans, but it was _something_. It meant that there was a small chance his friend's lower half would remain intact until graduation, and that maybe even one day, there would be tiny, young replicas of James running around, yelling and causing mischief and—

Or, on second thought, maybe it would be better if Lily castrated him.

"No, no, nonono. You do not want to compare any part of a girl to a frog. Except for maybe that Ravenclaw," Sirius interrupted, somehow being an actual voice of reason. Remus would have thought it was someone under Polyjuice, were it not for the fact that only Sirius could say something like that so frankly. He wondered how Padfoot had figured that one out. "Think things in nature. Like, uhhhh... I dunno, seaweed? The algae on the lake?"

Remus groaned, and regretted it a second later, because apparently vocalizing his doneness with their conversation reminded them of his existence.

"Hey Remus, do you want to help—" James started, gesturing weakly with the love letter and his quill.

Remus didn't even let him finish. "I wish I could, but I don't want to," he said, giving them each a brief moment of eye contact that he hoped properly conveyed how much he wished to stay out of this, and then he went back to reading his Herbology book.

Alas, that meant that he had to sit there, while as a group, the three considered asparagus, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, the sickly hue of the sky before a tornado, Malfoy's face when Sirius had sabotaged his boil cure potion in potions the week before, linchen, caterpillars, various other insects, merfolk, Muggle money, and a select few species of pixies, all in the hopes of finding a suitably poetic likening to Lily Evans' eyes.

It was right after Peter—oh, always Peter, if he didn't know better he'd think Peter was deliberately sabotaging James so that he could get at Lily, but no Peter wasn't even really smart enough to manage a secret like that, let alone a double agenda—suggested, "the tarnish on silver?" and, oh lord, how was that boy ever going to get a girl?

How were any of them going to get a girl, why in _Merlin's_ name was Sirius so popular with the girls when he honestly thought that celery was a romantic comparison, and oh—Remus finally broke:

"For Merlin's sake, you idiots, _e__meralds! Ferns, moss, ivy! Dark forests that you could get lost in, green tea, leaves after rain! Not seaweed, or olives, or see-through frogs!"_ he shouted, snapping his book shut, attracting attention from other people in the common room for only a moment before they realized who he was yelling at and figured that it was probably okay.

James, Sirius, and Peter stared at him, apparently completely stunned, before, with effort, James' jaw clicked shut, and he positively _beamed_. "Ooh! Emeralds! That's perfect! See, this is why we count on you for this stuff. You're the one who's good at the romance," he said, and jotted it down.

Sirius looked minutely offended, Peter was nodding in agreement, and _when had he become the one who was good at romance? How did he even respond to that?_

A moment later, James looked up again. "Now, how do I describe her mind?"

"As smart and confusing as a sphinx?" Peter tried.

"Like a really angry, really frightening, really hot professor," Sirius supplied.

Remus choked back a moan, and forcefully reminded himself that he really did love his friends, truly he did, and he would never attempt to wring their necks, no definitely not, he was a good friend, _really, he was._

xXx

I like to think that at some point after this, Remus and Lily managed to bond over how stupid the other Gryffindors were.

Thank you for reading, have a lovely Faerie free day, unless of course you are a member of the Fae numbers in which case just carry on, and byeeeeee!


End file.
